I arrived in Ise just in time for the rebuilding of the two
main Shinto shrines and massive celebrations in the streets
that only happen once every 20 years. The most sacred shrines
in all of Japan are in Ise, and Ise is considered "the soul of
Japan", so it attracts many visitors from all over the
country, and traveling there is a rite of passage for many.
Also!: within the first hour of arriving the owner of the
guesthouse and I realized that we were both born in the same
year and had some mutual friends on Facebook from the
underground punk and metal scenes. He was freaking right out
and I was instantly accepted as family by him and his wife who
was a vegetarian (a rarity in Japan, I was finding) and a
Vipassana meditator.
I took over for a French expat, Madi, who spoke and wrote
fluent Japanese and had been living and studying in Japan for
4 years. She showed me how everything worked at the hostel and
we went to a local bath house together. It was super cool to
see her interacting with all of the regulars, and people were
very impressed with her everywhere she went. At the same time,
I could right away feel that she didn't like me very much, yet
felt obliged to take me around with her (probably more of the
same dynamic as I was experiencing with Hotaru - these fraught
and complex friendships I have with women are likely mirroring
different facets of the fraught and complex relationship I
have with my mother!, ugh).
It seemed like after the initial allure wore off, that being a
foreigner in Japan was extremely difficult. And like most
other expats I met: Madi was drinking in excess and seemed
deeply deeply lonely.
After she left, I was glad to have some solitude (we had been
sharing a small room, cramped next to each other on tatami
mats on the floor). I spent some time wandering around Ise
exploring, and I became a regular at a little coffee shop in
the old part of town, where I'd write in my journals, eat
sweet rice balls and drink green tea. The woman working there
was a former flight attendant, a jazz fan, and also owned an
Italian restaurant. It was a warm and inviting space, and we
had some great conversations.
People in Ise were unpretentious and there were a lot of
working class neighbourhoods with friendly shop owners. I fell
in love with the city right away.
In the first week I had a few clashes with some of the other
workers at the guesthouse. We were really struggling to
communicate with each other and the tasks I was being asked to
do were very specific. One of them tried to boss me around and
got red in the face, so I got a bit feisty with him. Though
once everyone understood that I had strong boundaries and was
a hard worker, they were very kind and accepting.
Next door and up a narrow flight of stairs was a little
Spanish-style restaurant run by a young couple who had
previously worked at the guesthouse. They had amazing
vegetarian macrobiotic food: brown rice, tofu, kabocha pumpkin
and basil, ginger jelly desert, mushroom salad, and onion
mushroom soup. It was a cozy space and the couple were very
friendly, though I noticed a lot of marks on the man's arms
and I thought that he might be a former addict.
A few days after I arrived there was a tsunami warning and we
were all instructed to stay inside, but it didn't end up being
as powerful as expected. The weather in Ise and the outlying
districts was hot and humid with days of heavy rain, which
created lush and beautiful ecosystems in the surrounding
forests.
**
The hostel had only been there for 2 years and there was a
burgeoning alternative community growing around the place,
with many interesting people from all over Japan coming
through. Perhaps because Ise was such a deeply spiritual
place, many people came there alone, and most weren't
conforming to the mainstream of Japanese society.
There was a guy staying at the guesthouse (Kenji) who was
friends with everyone there and we ended up talking quite a
lot. He was struggling with many of the same mental health and
family issues that I was, and we became fast friends. It was
especially difficult for him to be a loner in a society that's
so group oriented. He also struggled to have his family take
his mental health struggles seriously and had been alienated
by many of his friends. The owners and other people working at
the guesthouse were very compassionate to him (and to me), and
would give encouraging advice but never judge.
My first week in Ise was all about settling in to the routine,
shopping for food to make for lunches and getting to know my
co-workers. I had a room to myself and was able to spend some
some grieving and writing in my journal.
Aug. 30
I celebrated my birthday by myself by riding one of the hostel
bikes out to the main shrines, which are surrounded by a 2000
year-old tree grove. Access to the shrines is restricted, but
the area around them has trails, coy ponds, restaurants, and
tourist shops. I ate veggie rice balls at a little food kiosk
with a seating area outside of it and then followed a parade
of people who were singing and drumming. On my way back to the
guesthouse I stopped and had chocolate ice cream.
The owners and my co-workers were eyeing me up when I
returned, as they probably saw on Facebook that it was my
birthday, but they seemed to sense that I wanted to keep in
under the radar and never said anything.
I spent the rest of the evening in my room lying on a tatami
mat under an open window quietly listening to a great mix I
had on my lap top: Xmal Deutschland, Gorillaz, Santigold, Nina
Hagen, Nick Drake and more. I could hear dishes being washed
in the apartment next door and soft foot steps outside of the
room I was in.
There was a gentleness in the way that everyone co-existed
with each other.
Aug. 31
I had been intending to go do a Vipassana, but the hostel
owner convinced me to stay at the guesthouse for longer, and
even though his justification was that I should "stay punk",
it was a good suggestion as I had already gone so deeply in my
soul during the one I did in New Zealand, and I was still very
vulnerable. And it really was incredible to be in Ise during
such a sacred time. So I rooted down for another 2 weeks.
There was a young woman staying for an extended period of time
who was studying Shinto. She always dressed in all-white, and
spent most of her time reading books. She showed me some
images of what she was studying and it was very fascinating,
with diagrams of the human energy field and complex symbols.
She said that she would be studying for 5 years to become a
priestess.
The essence of Shinto is "kami", which is like "chi" or
life-force, and everything is seen as part of an
interconnected whole. Ancestor worship, worship of nature and
honouring of deities are all part of the practice.
Shrines and temples are found together because they were
integrated when the Han Chinese came to Japan and settled -
the shrines being from the Indigenous spiritual system and the
temples being from Buddhism, which originated in India, spread
to China and then Japan.
Wooden "torii" gates marked the entrance to the shrines, which
were often surrounded by groves of ancient trees, and each
shrine has a specific spirit or deity that it houses,
overseeing everything from school exams to fertility. One is
meant to bow upon entering the gate and then purify the face
and mouth with water (if there was some around). 5 cent coins
are used for offerings and are given to the shrine. Then you
bow twice, clap your hands twice, hold your hands in prayer,
and then bow once more.
Some of the Buddhist temples I saw throughout Japan were free
standing, and some were accessed after entering a shinto
shrine and walking through a patch of trees. The temples
usually had gated entrances, and were sometimes guarded by
large stone creatures. Burning incense was a big part of the
daily ceremonies at the temples, and giant Buddha's were found
all throughout Japan.
Sept. 1
One of my co-workers organized a trip early in the morning to
watch the sunrise at a sacred place near the ocean. It turned
out that he was also a Vipassana meditator and big into
surfing and we started to become better friends. After our
adventure a bunch of us went to a restaurant near the
guesthouse, which became my favourite place. They had cheap
bowls of fried rice with an option for veggies and tofu and it
was ridiculously delicious. The people working there were very
friendly and you could watch them make the food while you ate.
I was having such a cool experiences in Japan and was so
fortunate to meet so many great people, yet I was also
suffering deeply inside, and my physical reactions to the
environment got worse and worse with reproductive and
digestive issues. I was emotionally trashed and mentally
unstable and isolating myself a lot. But who knows if going
home could have been better? It seemed like there was a
process that I needed to go through within myself and that it
was going to be brutal and painful regardless of what my
external circumstances were.
I had been reading a book called If You Meet Buddha on the
Road, Kill Him and one of the analogies in there to
inspire healing was that of the centaur, the half man and half
beast: our dual nature brought together as one. I thought
about that a lot when I was going through painful internal
upheavals. Dark and uncomfortable parts of myself would rise
the surface and I'd have to confront them and overcome them
and continue moving forward and living each day even when my
will was weak and I wanted to give up and felt like a bowl of
spilled spaghetti noodles.
In amongst the many social events I joined in on, and the
interesting friends I was making, I was also surrounded by
constant celebrations for the rebuilding of the shrines.
All day and all night, "temples on wheels" paraded around the
city being dragged by thick strands of braided rope. I ended
up talking a lot to man at the hostel who spoke really good
English and was a devout Shinto practitioner. He told me that
the Ise-jingu shrine (the main one) is 1200 years old and gets
rebuilt every 20 years; and only one kind of wood is used. He
also said that there were over 150 smaller shrines in Ise and
that each one had their own mobile temple and unique colours
and symbols for their outfits; and the schreeing sound that
the temple wheels made as they turned was also specific to
each shrine.
One night I saw a man and a woman in white with garlands
around their heads and white pom poms, with the emblems of
their temple on the back of their crisp linen outfits;
everyone yelping in unison. Another night I saw taiko drumming
in the back of a pick-up truck. Then another mobile temple
that had a spinning, alighted, multi-coloured globe. Another
temple had members wearing mossy green outfits with white
polka dots, and Michael Jackson ‘Beat It’ was blasting out of
loud speakers while a girl with backcombed side swept hair
beat down on cymbals. At night, bright lanterns filled the
darkened streets like glowing insects.
During the day Kenji and I started taking bus rides to the
outskirts of town and to the ocean side, and going on little
hikes. It was really beautiful out there and there were some
patches of rugged forest to explore, but I was finding it
difficult to have another person around. I wanted to be a
friend to him, but I was too wrapped up in my own mind, and I
could feel how nervous he was and how badly he wanted to
connect, so he was being overly attentive to my every need,
which I really didn't want him to do because I knew that he
was giving me energy that he needed for himself and his own
healing. And then I started giving him energy back that I
didn't really have to give and was feeling obligated,
frustrated, and depleted. Then he started sensing that I was
feeling that way and started to apologize and be even more
hyper attuned to my needs. But I remembered how messed up I
was when I got out of the hospital and how much of a
difference it made to have people around, and I knew that at
times I probably triggered similar feelings in others.
Like Alice Cooper once sang, "Sometimes it's better, to be
alooooone."
Monday Sept. 2
I woke up to the sounds of the family in the building next
door talking, making breakfast, and washing dishes.
I had been dreaming about Shinto, and the essence of Shinto
appeared to me as a glowing entity and told me that I had to
remain truthful and pure of heart.
I spent the day cycling around the streets randomly and went
through a lot of retro shopping arcades. One of them had a
vintage store in it, which I didn't see too often and I
found some great photos from a local talent show. On my way
back to the hostel I went by a food market and bought some
fruit and the owner's son was outside of the shop making
balloon animals. He gave me a Japanese language lesson and I
practiced my conversation skills. I was starting to be able
to pick up on some very basic Japanese, as even though the
written language is very complex, it's quite simple
grammatically and easy to pronounce.
Check out Nao's incredible balloon art here:
https://www.facebook.com/balloon.twist/
Sept. 3
My daily chores at the hostel consisted of making up beds in
the rooms, buying food at a nearby grocery store and cooking
vegetarian food for the staff. I also would say greetings in
Japanese to the guests who showed up like "Oyayou" in the
morning and "Oyasumi Nasi" in the evening (I was basically a
younger version of the cute older Chinese ladies I lived
next to in East Vancouver who only knew how to say "Hello"
and "Goodbye", and who's eyes would glaze over if I
responded with full sentences or more questions).
The hostel owners had a lot of friends who would show up and
help out with projects and we'd often all socialize together
in the evenings. There was roof top access in the building
and we'd go up there and smoke cigarettes and drink sake out
of very large sake bottles. I was making a lot of friends
and meeting a lot of really cool people.
I knew that I wanted to go to Tokyo before I left Japan, and
I ended up being invited to stay with a family in Kawasaki;
and I met several other people from Tokyo who offered to
show me around while I was there.
Thursday Sept. 5 2013
An American man called Scott showed up at the guesthouse and
he'd been living in Japan for 7 years. One of the hostel
guests burst out laughing upon seeing him and said, "You're
so fat!". It was my first taste of shameless body shaming,
and I was pretty shocked. I ended up asking him about it,
making sure I understood what she said correctly and he
explained that it wasn't meant to be offensive and it's just
a normal part of the culture to talk about people's physical
appearance really openly and a lot of the time people are
just concerned about your health. But it still didn't sit
right with me.
He spoke a lot about his struggles to adapt to Japanese
culture and how sometimes it would take him years to figure
out how some nuance of speech or action has offended
someone. Though a lot of leeway is given to gaijin, as most
Japanese people seemed to understand that it would be nearly
impossible for any foreign person to assimilate into the
complex and insular society. At the same time, there was a
genuine desire on the part of many people to connect to
foreigners and to share their culture and be understood.
Scott told me about a famous gyoza place that had been run
by the same family for 120 years and the next day I went
there with a friend called Umi, who was from Fukushima.
The family were making gyozas using freshly made dough in an
open area where we could watch - a small chunk would be cut
off of a large tube of dough, then it would be flattened and
rolled with a lot of flour, circles were cut out, a blob of
filling was placed in the centre, and the ends were pinched
together. First they were steamed in a large pan, and then
fried in another large pan. All of the family members worked
quickly and harmoniously with each other making massive
amounts of gyozas in an endless stream.
The gyozas were served with sauce that is for gyozas and
nothing else. Or else. You would be shamed. (side note: one
day at the hostel I put gyoza sauce on my kabocha and the
people around me were literally freaking out and they asked
if they could take a photo. They put the photo up on the
Facebook page for the guesthouse and it went viral. There
were hundreds of comments about my sacrilegious misuse of
sauce, and how outlandish it is that foreigners would do
such things. Another time a man asked me if I ever wore
shoes in my house and I was like, dude I wear my dirty
shoes to bed sometimes. His eyes almost flew out of
his head.)
The gyozas were very delicious, soft on one side, thin and
crispy on the other; and the dipping sauce was slightly
sweet and tangy with tones of spicy ginger. They melted in
my mouth.
Umi and I stayed at the restaurant and drank some Shoiyu and
she told me about the troubles that she and her family were
having, with medical issues and radiation poisoning. She
worked very long hours and was also going to school and she
had spent a long time planning her trip to Ise so she could
have some time for herself.
Slightly tipsy, we joked around like teenagers on our walk
back to the guesthouse and I knew that this time was very
special for her, and I felt so lucky to make such a sincere
friend.
When Umi left the guesthouse she gave me a small gift that's
of a little wooden toy that is weighted down in a way that
even if you whack it really heard it will always bounce back
and stand upright. She told me, "It's so you remember never
to give up." I still have it.
Sept. 7
I spent most of the day hanging out in my room and then I
woke up in the middle of the night and couldn't sleep so I
went outside of the hostel and was watching the sky float by
when the owner of the Spanish-style restaurant, Kazu, came
out of the bar and stumbled past me. He was very drunk, and
he started talking to me really openly about his life.
I felt like such an asshole because I thought that he might
have been using heroin when I first saw his arms but then he
told me that he was from Fukushima and he had a skin rash
from the nuclear meltdown. He said that a lot of his friends
and family had cancer, got nosebleeds and were sick and
dying. He said that his home life was "not so good" and that
he had moved to Ise to get away from it all. He had so much
sadness in his eyes, and I really felt for him. He was
pacing in the street and so distraught and I didn't know
what to do or how to help him.
Sept. 8
I felt like garbage and after I finished my chores I spent
the rest of the day unloading muffled scream cries into my
pillow, sweating into my sleeping mat as the sun melted into
the windows. I grieved out ribbons of intense pain, silently
washing my face in tears as the sounds of life from across
the window and outside the hallways pattered into my ears
reminding me that there was more to life than a void of
anguish wanting to devour me. And I reminded myself about
how fortunate I was in so many ways. Even though my own
feelings were legitimate and needed to be processed, I tried
to keep things in perspective.
A big part of me felt bad for feeling bad because I had so
many freedoms and privileges that others didn't, and so many
people in Japan looked up to my life and put me on a
pedestal. It all felt so wrong though, and I wasn't okay
inside. And I was deeply lonely, but seemingly incapable of
breaking out of my self-imposed prison.
Sept. 9
Hiro, the guesthouse owner, helped me find a metal/punk show
in Nagoya and I took the train there by myself. When I
arrived at the station I got surrounded by a gaggle of young
girls who were all very curious about my presence.
I got lost and wandered through the streets for a while...
I turned a few corners and then was completely engulfed in
lit up billboards, glass and tall buildings. When I found
my way back towards the venue (Huck Finn) I came across a
crew of insane metalheads and they invited me to come
party with them, but I had to say no. I was sticking to my
sobriety (aside from the odd social drink or two - but
this would not be social drinking, I was sure of that!).
On the bill for the show was Abigail / Unholy Grave and a
psychobilly band that I can't remember the name of. The
venue looked like a bit like a disco club on the outside
and there was a milieu of underground music fans outside.
I headed down a flight of narrow stairs covered in
withering waybills and some cool satanic art, then entered
a cozy hole in the ground where a small devout crew had
tightly packed themselves in. I could right away feel like
the crowd was way more my vibe than the King Cobra Squat
in Osaka, and I made friends with a guy who was
half-Okinawan and half-Brazilian, being born in San Paolo.
He told me that there were a lot of half-Brazilian people
in Nagoya who came to Japan to work in the Toyota factory
because they were able to get citizenship. He had been
living in Nagoya for 20 years.
I also met an expat called Joe who was from New Jersey,
and he met a Japanese woman in America and then moved to
Nagoya. He was one of the few foreigners I met who seemed
pretty happy and like he was fully accepted by the people
around him.
After the first band played I went over to Abigail's merch
table and picked up an enticing looking cassette tape with
a pink goat-headed femme on the cover. The main dude
behind the music, Yasuyuki, nervously asked me if I liked
cooking and then gave me an Abigial apron. Later on I read
some of the lyrics inside of the cassette and they were
horribly misogynistic, yet so ridiculous and over-the-top
that they were hard to take seriously - though I felt
conflicted about keeping the symbol of female subservience
he had bestowed me with.
When the insane posse of dudes I first encountered came
back from the bar I got introduced to them and 3 of them
were also half-Brazilian / half Japanese. They were going
berserk on the dance floor and were super friendly and
awesome, and I was pretty sure had I moved there that they
would have ended up being my friends.
Maybe why everyone was so much more friendly than in Osaka
is because Nagoya is working class, and also: underground
metal tends to be more nerdy and accepting than
underground punk for some reason. This is a total
generalization, and I'm sure there are lots of exceptions,
but on the whole I've noticed this over years.
After the show was over I went to a 24-hour internet cafe
a couple of blocks away (that I looked up before I left,
as to avoid a costly hotel room) and slept for a few
hours. I tried not to think too much about how many dudes
had jerked off in there watching squid porn as I curled up
into the foetal position with my hoody pulled over my
eyes.
The next morning I treated myself to an array of
over-sugary, multi-coloured drinks, ranging from flavoured
coffees to fizzy sodas in the drink bar they had in the
common area.
The train station in Nagoya was super cool:
On the way back to Ise I plugged in my ear buds and
listened to the Virgin Prunes as I watched out the window
at sprawls of bucolic countrysides with rice fields and
thatched wooden roofs, interspersed with pods of bleak
apartment cubes and cement encased river beds. People were
eating out of bento boxes, sprawling out lazily on the
bench seats, and a row of sleeping passengers in front of
me hung their heads like abandoned marionettes.
It was brutal to confront how quickly the earth had been
industrialized and I was deeply fucked up inside as I came
to terms with the fact that nearly everything I touched
had made it's way into my hands through slavery, bloodshed
and ecocide - like the the micro-chips in the technology
that had become such an integral part of every day life,
and the processed pre-packaged foods at the supermarkets.
The blooms of the Great Ocean Reef were fading to grey,
and the ancient forests of the world continued to be
plundered indiscriminately. It seemed like after a few
years all that would be left on the planet would be
locusts and jellyfish.
I was having a lot of intense dreams all throughout my
travels and doing a lot of shape shifting in them. In one
of them I started out as an office worker, then I became a
teenage boy, then myself, and then my brother. I was
living on the upper floors of an office building and then
I walked down a long flight of stairs out to a patch of
trees and then into a swamp where I came upon a creature
with gills along their face, back and calves, who emerged
out of the mud and did a dance for me, dripping in sludge
and slime with glowing green eyes.
When my time came up to leave Kazami, the owner asked me
to stay a couple of nights for free to relax and and to
meet some of their friends that would be coming to visit
and doing a small musical performance.
It was such a beautiful event, but it all felt too good;
and as had happened at other times during my travels when
I was exposed to sincere feelings of family and community:
it brought up a lot of painful emotions around how
isolated and alienated I'd been for most of my life. I
ended up leaving the gathering and went into my room and
cried for a long time.
The next day I went out for final cycle around Ise. I
went to Haiku and ate a lot of delicious food,
shamelessly sampling from from a big food souvenir
place. Then I ate two gigantic veggie shiso wrapped rice
balls and two donuts made with tofu and rice flour - one
slightly sweet with bean in the centre.
I sat near the river bed for a while thinking over the
two extra weeks I'd spent in Ise and all the spiritual
deaths and rebirths that had happened. My body was
reacting in more extreme ways to the environment I was
in and I found it extremely difficult to be in Japan,
though I also wanted to savour every minute because I
knew I was having a rare and awesome experience.
I was so thankful to be surrounded by such great
people and when I left the two guys who I had been
working with gave me really lovely parting gifts,
and they told me that I was a really hard worker and
that they would miss me. Knowing how hard so many
Japanese people work, I took that as a huge
compliment.
Wednesday Sept. 11
I headed back to Osaka to get all of my stuff from
Maki's, then went to Kyoto again to visit Arthur (he
ended up doing a long term volunteering position at
a hostel there), and met his new girlfriend Zoe from
Taiwan who was super cool. Then I went back to Osaka
and took an all-night bus to Kawasaki to meet up
with the family who had invited me to stay with
them.
I'm not sure why I went around in so many circles,
but now I can see that there was some magic in
everything that was happening, even though it made
no sense logically.
